“Customer Perception of Meme Marketing in Shaping Purchase Intentions”

Abstract

The rapid expansion of social media platforms has transformed brand–consumer communication, encouraging marketers to adopt innovative and informal promotional strategies such as meme marketing. Meme marketing leverages humor, cultural references, and virality to engage consumers in a non-intrusive manner, particularly among digitally native audiences. The present study aims to examine the influence of customer perception of meme marketing on purchase intention. The study adopts an exploratory–cum–descriptive research design and is based on primary data collected through a structured questionnaire from 140 social media users in Haryana. Customer perception was measured across dimensions such as entertainment, humor, relatability, authenticity, brand congruence, and trust, while purchase intention served as the outcome variable. Descriptive statistics and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were employed to analyze the data. The findings reveal that meme marketing is largely perceived as entertaining, engaging, and effective in enhancing brand recall and positive brand attitude. ANOVA results indicate that purchase intention influenced by meme marketing does not significantly differ across gender and educational qualification; however, significant differences are observed across age groups and frequency of social media usage. Younger consumers and individuals with higher social media engagement exhibit stronger purchase intentions toward brands using meme-based communication. The results support the Stimulus–Organism–Response framework by confirming that customer perception acts as a critical mediating mechanism between meme marketing stimuli and purchase intention. The study contributes to emerging digital marketing literature by highlighting the importance of perception-driven strategies in meme marketing. Practically, the findings suggest that brands should focus on authenticity, cultural relevance, and audience alignment to design effective meme campaigns that positively influence consumer purchase intentions.